'Furious 7' Review: Fifteen Years In, Faster Than Ever

It's multilayered, mass mayhem. In Furious 7 there can be two fights, two chases, and a gun battle going on at the same time. The camera never stops moving, the editing is frenzied, something is always crashing, fists and bullets fly constantly, and Michelle Rodriguez has an amazing orthodontist. This isn't the best Fast & Furious movie, but it's the most lunatic—pure batcrap crazy.

For good or ill, the Fast & Furious series is heading into its fifteenth year as the most dominant depiction of car-obsessed pop culture ever devised. There are plenty of cars in the new movie, but they're background players now. No more car-porn shots of polished cam covers, powder-coated nitrous bottles, and neon undercarriage lighting. In director James Wan's 7, if a car isn't doing something ludicrous—sometimes with Ludacris in it—there's no lingering over it.

The Fast & Furious series is heading into its fifteenth year

Keeping track of all F&F mythology has become part of the series' fun. Let's see, there's Dom (Vin Diesel) through which all things scowl, and Brian (Paul Walker) who used to be in the FBI and has been more or less hooked up with Dom's sister Mia (Jordana Brewster) since the first movie. And Letty (Michelle Rodriguez), who is tough enough to come back from the dead to be at Dom's side. Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson) is a cop of some sort who came along in the fifth movie and now sprouts a daughter. Then there's a Greek chorus of other regular characters who support and comment on everything. The big additions in this film are Jason Statham, who deploys his single pissed-off facial expression as the bad guy, and Kurt Russell as a government type who has wandered in from the Austin Powers movies as Basil Exposition to explain the nonsense plot.

The plot mechanics play out like a Wrestlemania undercard. It starts by cleverly introducing Statham's villain, heads into a fight with many glass walls to break through, goes over the top to airdrop five cars from a C-17 into a mountain road battle, and then heads to the UAE for an evening-gown match between Michelle Rodriguez and MMA fighter Ronda Rousey and some ridiculous car action across three high-rises. Logic is only occasionally involved, the laws of physics are barely respected, and the only reason to stop and think about it is because you're being paid to write a review.

The plot mechanics play out like a Wrestlemania undercard

Every movie asks its audience for a suspension of disbelief. The suspension with this one needs a long-travel, active, adaptive suspension with magnetorheological dampers. And it gets it.

While the action is overwhelming in this movie, it doesn't have the clever joy that runs through Fast Five's vault heist or the emotional impact that came with the death of Giselle in Fast & Furious 6 on the longest runway ever built. It's easy to admire for its audacity and the utter brilliance of the four film editors who stitched it together, but it's exhausting where Five was exhilarating.

And while Wan does a great job with the action, the intermittent melodramatic scenes are syrupy and overwrought. Every moment the rap and electronic music drops out in favor of a slow, sentimental piano treacle, the movie almost stops. More Chargers! More of that bad-ass Impala sedan! Hey, wasn't that car at SEMA?! Let's blow something up!

By far Furious 7's most impressive achievement, however, is how it has handled the death of Paul Walker midway through filming. Through careful use of CGI, body doubles (including Walker's brothers), and clips and elements from the previous movies it's almost as if Walker was there through the end of filming. There are a few scenes where other actors spend time talking at Walker's character instead of to him, or the camera settles on the back of a double's head, but it's otherwise practically seamless.

The final scene in the movie, which is a perfectly pitched send-off for Paul Walker, works fantastically well. It's sweetly conceived, uses exactly the right vehicle for Walker to drive off into eternity, and the preview crowd loved it. It's a heartfelt tribute to a great guy, and those who knew him even only slightly through his cars or his movies loved it.

NBCUniversal needs all the money these movies make, so inevitably there will be an eighth (and ninth and tenth) one. They can always top themselves action-wise, but it's going to be tough to replace Paul Walker as the surprising emotional core of the series.

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